Remote monitoring of ambulatory patients enables doctors to detect or diagnose heart problems, such as arrhythmias, that may produce only transient symptoms and, therefore, may not be evident when the patients visit the doctors' offices. Several forms of cardiac event monitors have been used.
A “Holter” monitor is worn by a patient and collects and stores data for a period of time, typically at least 24 hours, and in some cases up to two weeks. After the data has been collected, the Holter monitor is typically brought or sent to a doctor's office, laboratory or the like, and the data is retrieved from the monitor and analyzed. Holter monitors are relatively inexpensive, but they cannot be used for real-time analysis of patient data, because the data is analyzed hours, days or weeks after it has been collected.
More timely analysis of heart data is made possible by pre-symptom (looping memory) event monitors. Such a device collects and stores patient data in a “loop” memory device that constantly overwrites previously stored data with newly collected data. The event monitor may include a button, which the patient is instructed to actuate if the patient feels ill or otherwise detects a heart-related anomaly. In response, the event monitor continues to record data for a short period of time and then stops recording, thereby retaining data for a time period that spans the button actuation. The retained data may then be sent via a modem and a telephone connection to a doctor's office or to a laboratory for analysis.
Mobile Cardiac Telemetry (MCT) refers to a technique that involves noninvasive ambulatory cardiac event monitors that are capable of continuous measurements of heart rate and rhythm over several weeks. For example, some MCT devices include an automatic electrocardiograph (ECG) arrhythmia detector that couples to a cellular telephone device to immediately transmit automatically detected abnormal ECG waveforms to a remote monitoring center, which can then alert a physician. Such devices also include a memory capable of storing ECG waveform data, which is transmitted to a cellular phone for analysis, and then to the remote monitoring center whenever an event is detected by the smartphone algorithms. Although data about automatically detected arrhythmias is sent immediately to the remote monitoring center, without requiring patient action, the computational resources and corresponding electrical power (battery) required to perform the automatic ECG analysis in the device are significant.
Some MCT devices continuously send all collected ECG data to a remote monitoring center for analysis. These MCT devices typically do not perform any ECG analysis of their own. Although no patient-initiated action is required, the large amount of data transmitted by the MCT wireless devices consumes more of the wireless bandwidth used to convey the data. Furthermore, a large amount of computational resources is required at the remote monitoring center to analyze the continuous stream of received data, especially when many patients are monitored by a single data center.
To improve the collection, transmission and processing of physiological data, InfoBionic of Lowell, Mass. has developed a novel system that collects high definition physiologic data, but sends a downsampled version of it to a remote server for the first-pass processing. When the remote server detects an arrhythmia, it requests the high resolution data from the transceiver for a second-pass analysis. Embodiments of this system are disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/446,490, filed on Apr. 13, 2012, the entirety of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
However, to date, regardless of how much ECG data is collected and analyzed, and whether ECG data is analyzed on a local or remote device, the resulting ECG data is typically presented to physicians in long, printed reports. Such printed reports of ECG data are static, and therefore do not include the latest ECG data obtained from a patient device, and are also not able to be manipulated by a reviewing physician. Moreover, printed reports are tedious to review and difficult to understand, which makes physicians less interested in reviewing those reports. As a result, review of printed reports of ECG data is sometimes delayed and/or delegated to junior physicians. Thus, while the systems and methods of the '490 application address certain challenges associated with the collection and analysis of immense amounts of ECG data, a need remains for improved systems and methods for reporting and displaying collected and processed ECG data for a plurality of patients to healthcare professionals.